Emacs turns 50, and its oldest users now ask an AI to rewrite their editor
A 1978 veteran, a thirty-year user and a bystander who gave up on it all showed up to mark MIT Technology Review's anniversary piece.
Emacs began as TECO macros at MIT's AI Lab, and Richard Stallman's decision to ask users to send improvements back led, via commercial resale of the editor, to the GNU Project.
One long-time user now describes his AI assistant as a fairy that can fulfill any wish for his config; another says Claude replaced the editor entirely.
From tape editor to the first GNU program
Simson Garfinkel's MIT Technology Review piece traces the lineage: Dan Murphy's TECO for the PDP-1 in 1962, Carl Mikkelsen's Control-R display add-on in 1971, and Stallman's 1976 version at MIT's AI Lab where every key ran its own macro. Guy Steele proposed a shared command set to ease debugging help among lab members; he told the author his aim was to "address a social problem."
Stallman distributed EMACS for the price of a tape and postage, and his 1981 manual asked users to send back improvements. When EMACS began to be sold commercially, he started the GNU Project, and GNU Emacs became its first major application. Apple shipped it in Mac OS X until 2019.
The thread: lifelong users, lapsed users and a Lisp-free one
The oldest voice was brief:
"I started using Emacs at the AI lab in 1978." — gumby, who says he started at the AI lab in 1978
The founder of PartsBox, who has used it for over 30 years found the control argument stronger than the features:
"No corporation decides for me. No corporation builds in a new AI assistant. Nobody introduces ads or tracking." — the founder of PartsBox, a 30-year Emacs user
Others confessed to the opposite relationship. A daily user with a roughly 100-line config wrote:
"Yet I don't know LISP (any LISP!) at all" — a daily Emacs user who keeps a 100-line config
And a former heavy user from academia said the editor lost to tooling:
"IDEs and now Claude have taken over. Sad, but perhaps justified?" — a former daily Emacs user from academia
The pull is the one idea that survived fifty years
What people praised was less any feature than the fact that the editor is a live program they can change from within. That is also why the same users reach for an AI assistant to change it for them, and why the people who left cite uniform team tooling, not quality, as the reason.
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